Think Outside Microsoft's Box-How to Boot Win7 DVD and Upgrade to Win7

MvdB said:

Hello Mark, welcome to SF... I see you addressed brink here... not sure if that is what you wanted but if you want to ask him to look, PM him...

Hi -- well, I did address it to Brink in an existing thread. When I returned, I found that my post was moved to a new thread. I thought that it was he who moved it.

Not a big deal at this point, but thanks.

I think that if the question "How does the Windows 7 DVD know that it started the PC?" can be answered, we might have a solution to the problem.

Since a retail version of Window 7 DVD cannot be written to, it must be writing something to the hard disk, when it boots, that tells it that it started the PC.

(Note that I have already looked at the environment prior to running install, and edited all SET commands to point to the hard disk and me, rather than the DVD, and then ran setup.exe from the command prompt. Didn't work.)

There must be a way to fool the DVD’s setup.exe into believing that it was called from the Windows 7 desktop.

If this can be done, then we can boot the Windows 7 DVD, and do an in-place upgrade aka repair installation at that point, rather than having to launch the DVD from the windows desktop.

The repair procedure is currently crippled and pretty much useless for those who cannot get into the desktop.

Any ideas as to what/where to look?

MvdB said:

I'm not sure it I get what you really want but I've never heard of not being able to choose yourself what you want to do when you boot with a W7 disk, even a clean install...

Or, use one of the tut's here to (on another PC, borrowed/library, whatever) build a USB W7 install and set your BIOS to boot from USB too. That can be a solitary boot that doesn't even look at your HD's until you tell it to.

Hi MvdB -- Let's say that you have Windows 7 installed.

You reboot your PC and have it boot to the Windows 7 install DVD.

Once the DVD is loaded, you can choose install or repair. In many cases, repair works.

If you are an enterprise customer, you would be provided a copy of DART (Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset). It looks just like a recovery disk (it does not install an OS), but adds an additional option which opens another window providing you with about another dozen tools, which can come in handy. Search Microsoft's site and I believe it is now publicly available, hovering around v7ß3.

Neither of the above resolves my situation.

Anyway, if you choose install, you are prompted with Upgrade or Custom, where the former would retain all of your programs & their settings, only requiring you to redo any tweaks you might have made to the OS, and the latter will wipe out all those settings, requiring that you reinstall all your programs from scratch.

With Windows 7 installed, if you choose Upgrade, you will be presented with text indicating that the PC started by booting the DVD and in order to run an upgrade (in my case, it would be an in-place upgrade), it has to be done from the Windows desktop (not verbatim).

If you cannot get to the desktop you cannot directly do an in-place upgrade (now referred to as a repair installation), as was provided for in previous Windows incarnations (I have "worked with" Microsoft since DOS 1.0).

The current tutorials, to which you refer, are based upon Microsoft's mantra that you cannot do an in-place upgrade if you booted first to the DVD -- ask any Microsoft tech, and you will hear that almost word for word from each of them.

If Microsoft states that xyz are your only supported solutions and all three do not work, you can either accept that you are screwed, or delve deeper into what is possible, but not Microsoft supported. Any solution other than xyz, is unsupported, but not impossible.

It is the latter solution that I am looking for. I have no interest in whether Microsoft supports the solution; my interest is in whether it resolves my problem.

So, thinking outside the box, how can you make the DVD believe that it did not start the PC?

One of the most questions I have seen in a long time.

There is something in place to do a repair type install from boot media with win8 - as you doubtless already know.

I don't know a way of getting of win 7 boot media to do that.

If you don't have a suitable backup image , the next suggestion would be to to manually copy back the o/s from a shadow copy.

If you stopped a defrag prematurely - hard to say if you would be able access your shadows - depends what stage the defrag was at.

FWIW, I was using Paragon Partition Manager 11 to defrag the MFT and then compress the MFT. I saved the last of my drives (C & D) for last (making sure all the others were fine first), and that required a reboot, where Paragon's software did its thing.

I have already had this to the Microsoft Professional Tech group who then escalated it to a Sr Engineer, after I documented all the steps I took on my own. We are actively working on it, but I would love to have the solution before he does...

SIW2 said:

There is something in place to do a repair type install from boot media with win8 - as you doubtless already know.

Hi SIW2 -- As an additional path to follow, I have suggested that they provide me with a dumbed down version of Win8 that could be booted to upgrade me from Win7.

Presuming that it succeeded and booted to Win8, I could then uninstall Win8, restoring Win7, with the expectation that whatever was corrupted in the boot sequence would then be repaired.

It is being considered by them, which is a good thing, as it infers out of the box thinking!

I happened upon another approach geared toward Windows Server 2008 that might work for me. You know... desperate times...

What would happen if I simply booted the Windows 7 DVD, told it to do a custom install, let it run until it just completed its first copying routine, then abort (reset PC, if that is what it takes).

Then, insert a Windows RE disc or Dart7 and have it repair Win7.

I do not know exactly what is being copied and where, at that point, though.

Ideas?